Tantalizing Tales — August 2025 — Part One

Happy August, readers! My schedule has already been thrown into a tizzy, but I’m hoping that things smooth out a little bit before back to school and the start of the Arsenal season later this month. In the meantime, let’s look at some awesome shorter books coming out this week — I love a short book almost as much as I love a short king, lol — beginning with the inescapable topics addressed in screenwriter Jon Raymond’s latest novel God And Sex.

Set in a present day Pacific Northwest ravaged by global warming, this novel follows a writer of high-end spiritual texts named Arthur. He falls in love and begins an affair with Sarah, the wife of a newfound close friend. When an environmental disaster threatens Sarah’s life, Arthur frantically turns to prayer to save her. The mystifying event that ensues challenges his understanding of God and the divine.

As the audacious title suggests, Arthur must examine his relationships to carnality and spirituality and how the two intertwine. While this is a book about faith and religion, it’s also very much an examination of love, friendship, art, ecology and climate change. Plus, it comes in at under 300 pages, which I have to say is very much a draw for me recently.

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Another thrilling short novel that I’m super hoping to have time for soon is Rachel Eve Moulton’s Tantrum, a dark, provocative exploration of duty and motherhood.

Thea was relieved that her third pregnancy turned out to be her easiest. For once, she wasn’t consumed with anxiety about the baby, convinced that it would be born with green skin or a third eye or tentacles. She was fine and her baby would be fine, too.

But the moment that the nurses handed Lucia to her, Thea just knew that her baby girl was a monster. Not only was Lucia born with a full set of teeth and a devilish glint in her eye: she was always, indiscriminately hungry. One day Lucia pointed at her brother, looked Thea dead in the eye and said, “I eat.”

Thea doesn’t know whether to be terrified or proud of her rapacious baby girl. As Lucia starts growing faster and talking more, dark memories bubble to the surface — flashes from Thea’s childhood that won’t release their hooks from her heart. Lucia wants to eat the world. Thea might just let her.

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Our next shorter novel selection also questions the traditional role of women through a monstrous lens, in Xenobe Purvis’ exciting debut The Hounding.

During a hot, hazy summer in the 18th-century English village of Little Nettlebed, a peculiar rumor circulates: the Mansfield sisters are turning into dogs. Little Nettlebed, a town bulging with oddities, is no stranger to the rumor mill. The Mansfield girls are its latest guiltless victims — unless, that is, there’s some truth to the outlandish tales.

When villagers begin to report hearing strange barking, with one man claiming to have seen the sisters transform before his very eyes, a frenzy is sparked, with five young girls trapped in the center. The villagers have never liked the Mansfield sisters – they’re a little odd, perhaps a bit snobby. But even if the village’s belief in witchcraft is waning, aversion to difference is as widespread as ever, as neighbors are quick to turn their pitchforks on these unbiddable sisters.

In a society where the power of rumor and gossip prevails over the truth, nothing could be more dangerous than to be an unconventional girl. A richly atmospheric parable of the pleasures and perils of female defiance, this novel considers whether in any age it might be safer to be a dog than an unusual young woman.

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Jeannine Atkinson’s Knocking On Windows might break the 300 page count, but is a searing Young Adult memoir-in-verse detailing the author’s own experience dealing with memory, healing and finding her voice as a rape survivor.

Six weeks after the start of her freshman year of college, Jeannine Atkinson found herself back in her childhood bedroom, having suffered an unimaginable trauma. Home again in Massachusetts, she struggles to reclaim her life and her voice.

Seeking comfort in the words of women, she turns to the lives and stories of Sylvia Plath, Maya Angelou and Emily Dickinson. Through raw and poignant letter-poems addressed to these literary giants, Jeannine finds that the process of writing and reflecting has become not only a means of survival but the catalyst for a burgeoning writing career.

Inspired and ready to move forward, she enrolls in her state university, where she feeds her growing passion for writing in fiction seminars. But she finds that she’s unable to escape the pervasive misogyny of her classmates and professors, who challenge her to assert her own voice against a backdrop of disbelief and minimalization. This time, though, Jeannine is not willing to go down without a fight.

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Dipping back below the 300 page count is Alexis Soloski’s Flashout, a dual-timeline novel that takes a deep dive into the experimental theater scene of the 1970s, and the ramifications of one young woman’s choices over twenty years later.

New York, 1972. A cloistered college student slips out of the dorms to attend a performance by a legendary experimental performance troupe. Within months, she has left campus life behind and joined the company, infatuated by its charismatic David Crosby-esque/Lothario-like leader and his promises of absolute freedom.

California, 1997. A theater teacher at an exclusive private school receives an unsettling letter. With her job at risk and her past clawing at her present, what will she do to protect the life she has so carefully constructed ?

This taut, suspenseful story explores the nature of seduction and the deadly limits of liberation through the eyes of a young woman chasing danger beyond her comprehension. It’s a coruscating coming-of-age story and an immersive thriller that examines the enchantments and perils of art.

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Finally, we close out with another book that barely breaches the 300-page mark, Courtney Psak’s The Tutor, out in eBook Thursday and physical in November (when I hope to have a tasty excerpt available for you!)

Rose is a dedicated wife to her husband Grant, and devoted mother to her son James. Having recently moved to a grand mansion in glamorous Palm Beach, Florida, Rose is keen to do whatever she can to help James fit in to his new life.

As part of these efforts, she hires a tutor to help James with his academics. Isabel is young, smart and beautiful. Not only does she get along with James, she gets results. But when Isabel starts getting a little too close for comfort, Rose can’t help but think that Isabel is looking for more than just tutoring. Can Rose uncover exactly whom she’s let into her house, or will this turn out to be an irrevocably deadly lesson?

Told from the points of view of three generations of women, this is a novel about the dark side of privilege, the long shadow of family and how far some women will go to protect who and what they love. It unpacks legacy, motherhood and identity in one gripping read.

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Let me know if you’re able to get to any of these books before I do, dear readers! I’d love to hear your opinions, and see if that will help spur me to push any of them higher up the mountain range that is my To Be Read pile.

And, as always, you can check out the list of my favorite books in my Bookshop storefront linked below!